Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

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"How do the Darwinians explain the prevalence of male baldness in much of the white race (the Irish being the big exception)? That a man 50,000 years ago had an accidental genetic mutation which caused him to lose his hair, and the women in his tribe were more attracted to him with his bald head than to all the other hairy men, and so he had more offspring than the hairy ones, and so the genetic mutation for baldness spread through the population?"

I don't think that's what LA is saying. But I think the problem is this:

knowing evolutionary theorists as I do, I'd be willing to bet that they can come up with a dozen or so reasonably plausible hypotheses in about as many minutes.

I'd be less inclined to roll my eyes if instead they actually said, "Heck if I know" and _left_ it at that instead of spinning out a bunch of conjecture. It's that impulse to tell a story about everything that is one of the strongest reasons ordinary people are inclined to think that we might be looking at something akin to cargo cult science. (The "herbal medicine" people my relatives used to go to were really good at coming up with a dozen or so reasonably plausible hypotheses in about as many minutes, too. "Reasonably plausible" at least to those predisposed to trust them.) A little humility would go at least some distance towards restoring confidence.

As Chucky indirectly points out, the evolutionary theorists don't even need to posit a reason why baldness is advantageous by itself; they just need to posit that it goes along genetically with something else that's advantageous enough to outweigh any disadvantages of baldness itself. As long as the baldness-plus-whatever package is a win overall, the evolutionary theorist is sitting pretty.

What would be needed to pose a real problem for evolutionary theory is a feature that the theory can't explain even in principle. Male pattern baldness definitely isn't it.

Not that it particularly matters, but it's not due to excessive testosterone per se. Rather, it is due to a sort of excessive sensitivity to testosterone.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, it's not essential to Darwinian evolution that everything be selected for, or that all traits bear some competitive advantage. Some less advantageous morphologies could still exist, and some recessive traits with no obvious advantages could still become widespread in certain discreet populations. Not every less-desirable trait from a mating standpoint necessarily must be annihilated for Darwin's story to be true. (I say that as a firm skeptic of macroevoltuion.)

Sage, that is definitely true of Darwinism: random change means that lots of changes crop up, including some that are totally tangential to survival (neither a plus nor a minus). Sometimes those changes can spread when they are not directly contrary to survival, even if they are not helpful to survival. Darwin himself pushed the possibility of selection on other criteria than survival alone: he published also on "survival of the sexiest", referring to traits that might have been viewed as desirable in a mate even thought they don't have anything to do with survival at all. Accidents like that will happen.

Also, a trait might be a survival trait in a small environment, become prevalent in that environment, and then spread to other environments where it is not in any way a survival trait merely because it IS a survival train in one place and is not contrary to survival in the rest. Or the environment where it WAS a survival trait can cease to exist, but leave the trait behind.

Like sage, I am skeptical of how far Darwinism can be pushed, and I am skeptical of whether it can be mated to a sound philosophy of nature.

Apparently, our Larry thinks that the existence of male pattern baldness is simply inexplicable, absent the intervention of the God of the Gaps.

I'd also note, it's not like the only options on this subject are "Darwinism" or "God". It's conceivable that natural selection is not the only, or even the primary, explanation for various traits.

For those interested in a non-Darwinian but non-ID approach to the question of evolution - not one I personally endorse, but I offer it up simply because it's presented as an example of an evolutionary theory that is not Darwinian - I recommend The Mutationism Myth by research biologist Arlin Stoltzfus. From the linked essays:

If we look at Darwinism in Popperian terms, as a theory1 that takes risks and generates potentially falsifiable claims, then (counterintuitively) it is largely a theory of the role of variation in evolution. The claims that selection is "important", and that it has some inalienable role in adaptation, carry little risk and have been widely accepted for 150 years. By contrast, the restrictions that Darwinism places on variation, in order to make it a subordinate factor that supplies "raw material" to selection, are risky and controversial, e.g., the claim that variation is random with respect to the direction of evolution, or that the rate of evolution does not depend on the rate of mutation, or the "gradualist" claim that variation is not a source of discontinuity. The architects of the MS invested the "gene pool" with nearly magical properties in order to improve the prospects for adaptation. Problematic claims about the role of variation are, and have been for 150 years, the overwhelming basis for scientific criticism of Darwinism.

You're bored and looking for a fight? That's the only reason I can see for starting an argument with Auster over Darwinism.

I actually got into a couple arguments with him about that years ago, via comments on his website. I think he posted some of my comments and not others. Looking back, I don't even see the point. There's no shortage of really bad philosophy on the internet. Why not just ignore it? Countering Auster's arguments on Darwinism falls in the category of mugging cripples.

By the way, I think he goes by "Lawrence," not "Larry." Even people who misunderstand Darwinism are entitled to that courtesy, right?

The reason the main post strikes me as "looking for a fight" and perhaps also as "bored" is because the comment that prompted it is relatively off-hand, so why jump on it? To me, Auster's original comment has a bit of humor about it and is aimed at the "we can explain everything in our Procrustean terms" attitude that one really does run into, especially among social Darwinists. There isn't anything about God anywhere in Auster's original entry, so the post's introduction of God looks like a dragged-in swipe at anyone who thinks that _some_ things in nature (though not male pattern baldness) are better explained by intentional Divine action than by purely secondary causes. The phrase "God of the gaps" is a tired skeptical phrase used unfortunately often as a substitute for careful consideration of non-deductive arguments.

As misinformed as Auster's remark was, it truly pales in comparison to O'Reilly's "tides go in, tides go out, never a miscommunication" proof of God's existence. Colbert got medieval with him over that one. Then O'Reilly doubled down and said nobody knows where the moon came from, so there liberal pinheads.

Steve, I'm sorry about egging on you-know-who in the other thread, but I thought a free market purist would appreciate me haggling over the price.

Pattern baldness almost always kicks in after a man's done most of his procreating anyway. So it would be, at most, neutral to procreative success. But to the extent it is associated with higher testosterone levels, it's a wonder why we don't consider a lack of male pattern baldness to be the mutation (like the Irish).

Sure, Darwinists have dozens of hypotheses. That way, they cover their butts by switching between explanations for every scenario. Pick one girl and commit to her, otherwise no one should take you seriously.

Matteo: "And not a single one would need to have evidence presented. Just thinking them up is decisive. Because for Darwinists, imagination is knowledge."

Oh, please. ....unlike the ID proponents whose perspective seems to be informed by some millenarian worldview mixed with civil rights activism and Cultural Marxism. If for Darwinists "imagination is knowledge," then for Jacobin ID activists "evolution is a violation of universal human rights."

... Just thinking them up is decisive. Because for Darwinists, imagination is knowledge.
This seems to be how 'modern evolutionary theorists' reason (ahem) in these situations:
1) If I can imagine it, it's plausible;
2) It it's plausible, it's possible;
3) If it's plausible, it's probable;
4) If it's probable, it's factual;
5) If it's factual, it's ... what? ... what are you? some anti-'Science!' bible-thumper?

But Bruce, here's the thing: For MAR, in science as in religion, it's all about political ideology, not about truth and facts in the field in question. If he finds a way to cast something as opposed to his political ideology, and if that way seems convincing to him, then discussions with him of the actual truth of the matter on the point at issue become nigh impossible.

As Behe has pointed out repeatedly in response to Arnhart (who is a very annoying person to listen to, I find), it's just silly to call Darwinism either politically liberal or politically conservative. And we should want to know what actually happened, not what we think supports our political agenda.

Lydia: It's not all about political ideology, at least not for me (although I find that to be the case for ID people who look at evolution through some strange lens of Cultural Marxism combined with fundamentalism (see "evolution news" link above), which was the point I was making in previous comment). I, from my limited understanding, also happen to believe Darwinism to be a valid scientific theory. I'm no scientist so I cannot speak with authority. I have read Darwin, EO Wilson, WD Hamilton, et al., and from my layman's perspective contemporary evolutionary theory (NeoDarwinism) seems much more plausible than what I see coming from the Discovery Institute website. My point in the above comment was not to suggest that everything should be reduced to ideology (it should not), but that conservatives have nothing to fear from contemporary Darwinian science. As others smarter than I have pointed out, for the religious it's quite possible that God set the laws of evolution in motion as he set the laws of physics in motion.

Although not synonymous, they were bundled together until quiet recently. Early conservatives (e.g. Kirk) gave arguments against egalitarianism and anti-egalitarianism was a constant theme throughout early conservatism. It was assumed that if you were a conservative, you were opposed to ideology of egalitarianism. Now, of course, with the rise of neoconsevatism (which has incorporated Jacobin and Trotskyite elements into conservatism, perhaps making the concept meaningless), this has changed.

Both egalitarianism and anti-egalitarianism can be pernicious. The conservative is neither, really: he believes in both equality and inequality, when and wheresoever they are true. He also rightly discerns when, and to what degree, equalities and inequalities matter.

Jeff: "[The conservative] believes in both equality and inequality, when and wheresoever they are true."

It's been at least a decade since I read Kirk, but didn't he in the Conservative Mind (or maybe another book) argue that conservatives should support equality in only two cases (1) equality before a judge in a court of law (2) equality in judgement before God? Kirk, like Eliot, saw egalitarianism as the great leveling force of the modern age.

The ideology of egalitarianism, in its essence, is the foundation of much of left-wing thought. The question is whether egalitarianism comes from Christianity (e.g. Benoist, Spengler) or from the Enlightenment (Thomas Fleming in Morality of Everyday Life, et al.).

As an aside, although some of the religious have attacked Darwinian thought, in the future the real criticism of Darwinism might come from leftists, who dislike the anti-egalitarian implications of Darwinism. As Paul Gottfried has pointed out, the neocons opposed Darwinism even back when they were Trotskyites because they saw it as "leading to fascism." The Economist a couple years ago (see link above) ran an article how modern science (genetics and Darwinism) is opposed to political correctness and that we have reached a "private crisis of conscience."

It's been at least a decade since I read Kirk, but didn't he in the Conservative Mind (or maybe another book) argue that conservatives should support equality in only two cases (1) equality before a judge in a court of law (2) equality in judgement before God?

If Kirk ever wrote that, I'm sure it was much more qualified. It doesn't sound like him in any case. Kirk himself, an exemplar of Christian hospitality, filled his home in Mecosta with "third world" refugees from just about everywhere, so he clearly believed in a fundamental human equality as taught by Christian doctrine - which is not at all the same as that professed by modern egalitarians.

Kirk's place was to do battle against the prevailing liberal errors of the day. The resurgent paganism of Third Positionists, the European New Right, HBDism, etc., was not on his ideological radar. Nevertheless as a faithful Catholic he would certainly have opposed them all when the need arose.

No, HBD is just a subset of looking at biological diversity, something first proposed by EO Wison. Proponents of it are of nearly every political and religious stripe -- ranging from religious Christians and pagans to atheists, from conservatives to liberals.

JC: "The resurgent paganism of Third Positionists, the European New Right, HBDism, etc."

I didn't even bring these topics up. I don't know why you're so obsessed with them. I was simply talking about Darwinism vs. Egalitarianism.

Kirk wrote some pretty hard hitting defenses of apartheid in South Africa and of segregation in the South. I'll go look at all my Kirk books but I'm pretty sure that he argued that conservatives should only support equality (1) before a judge in a court of law and (2) before the judgement of God.

In the meantime, I just found this online:

Russell Kirk: "The Injustice of Equality"

"In short, ladies and gentlemen, I have been arguing that it is profoundly unjust to endeavor to transform society into a tableland of equality. It would be unjust to the energetic, reduced to equality with the slack and indolent; it would be unjust to the imaginative, compelled to share the schooling and the tastes of the dull; it would be unjust to the thrifty, compelled to make up for the losses of the profligate; it would be unjust to those who take long views, forced to submit to the domination of a majority interested chiefly in short-run results."

Again, as I said above, you're talking about the same Russell Kirk who defended apartheid in South Africa (arguing that blacks were incapable of self-government) and who defended segregation in the South? Despite the current neocon propaganda that MLK was a "conservative," nearly all conservatives in the 1950s opposed the Civil Rights movement. I don't know why Russell Kirk you're talking about, but the one I read despised egalitarianism.

MAR, you are shamelessly cherry-picking Kirk, just like you do everything else. Although he did argue against rapidly abolishing apartheid in South Africa, for reasons that were totally sound (as we can see by the hell-hole South Africa has become), he never argued that racial segregation was always and everywhere obligatory. He argued that South African blacks at the time lacked a level of civilization that was needed to rule the country, which was true enough, but he never argued that all blacks are racially incapable of self-government, or that blacks did not share in a fundamental human equality. Kirk was, for most of his career, fairly sanguine on immigration and had praise for non-white immigrants to the United States in some instances. In short, he's not on your side, so please stop desecrating his memory.

Someone at Rockford (Richert??)had a good piece on the pagan right. The argument was that it represents a radical discontinuity with our (recent) ancestors. Why should I want continuity with ancient, anonymous ancestors as opposed to, say, my great-grandfather?

Bruce, I don't think theistic evolution makes any sense, personally, though for Catholics the opinion is allowed within certain fairly tight parameters.

I'm sure there are non-pagan HBDers (I don't know anything about Sailor's religious beliefs, do you?), but HBD theories do seem to attract many pagans, atheists, and agnostics who are seeking to make sense of the world apart from Christianity.

Bruce: I'm not a neopagan, although I greatly enjoy reading pagan classics from the Celtic, German, Greek and Roman traditions -- ranging from Aristotle to the Eddas. I do, however, think that some European neopagans (e.g. Benoist) are worth reading. Their critiques of modernity and egalitarianism are much more interesting and learned than anything that's coming from the desks of Jonah Goldberg or Ramesh Ponnuru. Also, I should add, I am not a white nationalist. My position is a pro-Western position (cf. Samuel Huntington).

Again, people who look at HBD are quite diverse, ranging from atheists to the religious, from liberals to conservatives, from immigration restrictionists to open-borders advocates. Like Darwinists, optometrists or veterinarians, they come in all stripes. Some HBD proponents: Steve Sailer, Steve Hsu, Henry Harpending, Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, Ron Unz, Pat Buchanan, et al., and about a new blog every week.

Recently, Cochran and Harpending's _10,000 Year Explosion_ (a must-read), which received good reviews from the conservative and liberal press, has done much to popularize HBD. Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn has also popularized it.

I think MAR and Jeff in some of the back and forth above are talking past each other because they're talking about different types of equality. There's spiritual equality and there's empirical equality. Not the same thing.

"...the evolutionary theorists don't even need to posit a reason why baldness is advantageous by itself; they just need to posit that it goes along genetically with something else that's advantageous enough to outweigh any disadvantages of baldness itself. As long as the baldness-plus-whatever package is a win overall, the evolutionary theorist is sitting pretty."

Exactly.

Aaron, also way up above:

"Countering Auster's arguments on Darwinism falls in the category of mugging cripples."

Well, yes & no. Auster isn't stupid. But he doesn't seem to be very intellectually curious. He's obviously never cracked a book on philosophy of mind.

I'm Catholic and have totally and completely come to believe the HBD crowd. I'm also a neocon, so go figure!

On the other hand, I used to uncritically believe in the NeoDarwinian evolutionary synthesis but by keeping an open mind, reading contrarians on the subject (including writers at the Discovery Institute and folks like Vox Day and this blog's former contributor Zippy Catholic) I'm now much, much, much more skeptical of the theory.

Needless to say, I don't think MAR is fair to the neocons (Jacobins!), or to "National Review" writers, or even to the Discovery Institute (what the heck does it mean when you characterize their worldview as informed by Cultural Maxism?!)

I also think Bruce makes a good point about equality -- it comes in many flavors and generally conservatives need to know more about the type of equality before we sign to support the cause.

There are decent neocons, such as yourself. I typically agree with most of what you write here. As you, I don't think there's necessarily any incompatibility between Christianity, Darwinism and HBD. And there are other combinations. Some believe in ID and HBD. Others believe in theistic evolution and HBD.

I wrote Cultural Marxism because much of the underlying ideology in opposition to Darwinism at the Discovery Institute seems to be informed by an egalitarian worldview informed by Cultural Marxism. Read David Klinghoffer's tiresome rants about how "Darwinism is racist." Other neocons have taken up this position:

There's spiritual equality and there's empirical equality. Not the same thing.

There is also ontological equality, which is not limited to the spiritual: men are men, and as such they have certain needs, obligations, and rights which are the same. MAR is predictably silent on this point.

In other respects, there are inequalities among men, and these too need to be acknowledged and accommodated when they are relevant. Any conservatism worthy of the name is going to be about reality: it will neither deny human differences nor exaggerate them, and will judge rightly the measure in which they should be addressed in custom, law, and public policy. In this the western conservative is guided by the precepts of his Christian faith.

But if he has no religion, can he then turn to HBD? Sailor mostly steers clear of policy prescriptions, to his credit, and is fairly modest about the implications of his work. Other HBD enthusiasts are not so cautious. As the gentleman who posted the Steve Sailor interview to YouTube gushed, "HBD explains the world!" (Funny, one doesn't need to look far to find this sentiment in the HBD crowd.)

I think what we on the "right" need to be careful about is how we react to the errors of modernity. Truly, egalitarianism has ravaged western civilization and seeks its ruin: do we then respond by embracing the opposite error? There is a growing movement of those who do, and under the circumstances their ideology is dangerously seductive. Caveat emptor.

Jeff,when writing counter-narratives to the dominant leftist discourse, some people on the hard right go too far in the opposite direction (e.g. from IQ doesn't matter to IQ is everything). I haven't missed this tendency. I think C.S. Lewis had something to say about this - the Devil sending errors into the world in pairs and relying on dislike of one to drive us to the other - I can't find the reference.

Writers like Anthony Esolen and David Bentley Hart have argued that the West cannot coherently revert to paganism since Christianity has effectively purged the pagan West of its negative aspects and absorbed and transformed its positive ones. See Hart's masterful essay "Christ and Nothing," for instance.

As far as neo-conservatism goes, there are a couple good recent pieces on the Cato Unbound site, one, an examination by libertarian C. Bradley Thompson, the other a response by trad-con Patrick Deneen.

I generally like Klinghoffer's stuff, but I agree with you that both he and other ID folks can go over the top when making the case that Darwin = racism (or that it leads to fascism!). Thanks for the links.

Bruce and Jeff C.,

I think you both point to the essential truth about HBD -- it cannot explain the world and as Bruce says, it is absurd to argue "biology explains everything". By the way, to his credit, Sailer (with an "e") is always careful to argue that the science behind HBD itself points to a combination of nurture and nature. It is the left that tries to deny any role for nature and the possibility that man is not infinitely malleable.

Rob G,

Bentley Hart is amazing -- after discovering him in "First Things" I got his last book "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies" and I couldn't put it down. You are also right that the Cato Unbound website is worht checking out for hosting that interesting discussion on neoconservatism, using Kristol's new book as a jumping off point. Although when Patrick Deneen has to be the one defending the neo-cons, it suggests that Cato could have done a better job of getting someone more firmly in the neo-con camp to argue in defense of the neo-con position.

At Front Porch Republic Deneen wrote, "While I have my criticisms of neo-conservatism, I found Thompson’s synopsis of their thought to be so inaccurate as to require my grudging defense." I'm not sure that Cato expected him to take a defensive position, but he felt compelled to seeing that Thompson's piece was such an immoderate hatchet job.

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